Invisible women: a study of jewellery production in West Bengal, India

The paper is an ethnographic study examining the gendering of jewellery production in the villages of Medinipur, West Bengal, India. The jewellery (primarily hand woven silver chains) is marketed nationally and internationally and the villages are linked to the domestic and the global markets through a series of subcontractors. The paper is a critical analysis and deconstruction of the gendered division of labour where women's work in chain-weaving is constructed as ‘leisure activity’, requiring little training and carried out at home. The women are rendered invisible as workers through the discursive practices of control over their sexuality, restricting their mobility geographically and in the job hierarchy, and earn a low average wage of INR 1.35/hour for chain-weaving. Men engage in the soldering and finishing of chains, which is constructed as ‘tough’, requiring long training, carried out in the visible spaces of the workshops and are paid an average wage of INR 5/hour. The discourses feed into the subjective identities of men as bread-winners and constitute women as housewives. However, women challenge the construction of chain-weaving as ‘leisure’. In their affirmation of chain-weaving as ‘work’ they present a fragmentation to their subjective identities as housewives and navigate their paradoxical situation; an ambivalence created by what they do, how they view what they do and how they are viewed in doing it. In addition, some women cross the gendered division of labour and engage in soldering, thus challenging its construction as particularly ‘tough’ for women. Although how this disruption is currently negotiated mutes its resistive effect, the fact of it has created new discursive practices by which the crossing of the gendered divide is achieved.